GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Two local humorists, a New Yorker cartoonist and a Saturday Night Live writer, have created a deck of New York “superhero” cards, I recently discovered. The superheroes range from Summer Intern to Paul Giamatti to Unemployed Banker.

This hero seemed worth sharing with our readers:

For years, the number of new teachers entering the city’s job market by way of alternative certification programs has been in the thousands. But this year the flood has slowed to a trickle.

When Chancellor Joel Klein announced a teacher hiring freeze last year, organizations that recruit and train new teachers, such as Teach for America and New York City’s Teaching Fellows, began planning to admit fewer teacher-hopefuls. Together, those two programs are planning to take fewer than 700 applicants this year, down from over 2,000 two years ago.

“We anticipate at this point that our needs will be more limited than they have been in past years, except for perhaps this year,” the Department of Education’s Executive Director of Recruitment and Teacher quality, Vicki Bernstein, told me in October. At the time, Bernstein, who oversees recruitment for the Teaching Fellows program, guessed that about 700 fellows would be admitted.

The real number of Teaching Fellows will be closer to 450, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Ann Forte. In 2009, the Teaching Fellows’ cohort numbered 700, which was already a significant drop from previous years when nearly 2,000 fellows entered the city’s schools annually. (more…)

When singer John Legend agreed to talk on a Teach for America panel about his views on education, he probably thought he’d get a warm reception. After all, he supports charter schools, a longer school day, and vigorous standardized testing, all policies championed by the education reform movement Teach for America helped fuel.

But things didn’t go his way last night.

One of six panelists at the event, “Men of Color and Education: A Discussion on the Pursuit of Excellence,” Legend met with more criticism and more boos than he’d bargained for. At first, the audience of mostly black and Latino teachers — most of them TFA members — praised Legend’s support for putting good teachers in front of high-need students, but the cheers soon turned to boos when he advocated for testing. (more…)

Teach for America isn’t alone in planning to keep its new members busy even if they don’t land positions before the start of school. The city’s Teaching Fellows program is also offering short-term activities for new teachers shut out by the hiring freeze.

Teaching Fellows who haven’t been hired by a school by Sept. 18 can sign on for six more weeks of “extended pre-service training,” paid for by the city, as part of an arrangement developed even before the hiring freeze was announced in May. Accepted Fellows learned about the extension option this spring, before they agreed to join the program.

Fellows who participate will earn $250 a week in exchange for four days of practice teaching. They’ll also get to attend the program’s required graduate program for free during that time. But they won’t be offered health insurance or other benefits, according to Ann Forte, a Department of Education spokeswoman. Unlike TFA, the Teaching Fellows program won’t involve home-cooked meals, Forte said.

The short-term, low-pay program for unplaced Fellows follows a fight last year over how long Fellows without jobs should be entitled to a salary. (more…)

Teach for America is calling on its sizable alumni base to help entertain new teachers while they wait for the hiring freeze to be lifted.

Despite halving the size of this year’s cohort and directing many teachers to charter schools, TFA still hasn’t found jobs for 118 of its 300-odd new teachers, according to an e-mail sent to graduates of the program yesterday. While TFA officials “continue to be optimistic” that the Department of Education’s freeze on outside hires will be lifted, they anticipate that “a substantial number” of new corps members will remain jobless when the school year begins, the e-mail said.

The organization is putting together additional training for the unplaced teachers, according to the e-mail from Jemina Bernard, director of the program’s New York region. It is also asking the more than 2,000 graduates of the program who live in the city to provide “social and cultural opportunities,” such as home-cooked meals and walking tours, between now and the end of October for the new teachers. ”I want to be very clear how critical this period of time is for our 2009 corps and how extremely important it is that we come together as a family to fully support them,” Bernard wrote.

Teach for America told its new members this spring that they would be guaranteed a salary for 40 business days after the start of classes, even if they hadn’t found a position. (more…)

With just three weeks before the Democratic primary, we’re pushing candidates to explain their positions on the education issues few are talking about. And now we’re publishing their answers in this special election section.

Some highlights: Public advocate hopeful Mark Green suggests the next mayor should find a new chancellor, though he doesn’t like the word “fire.” The only Republican candidate for comptroller, Joe Mendola, supports efforts to stop the growth of charter schools. And Daniel Dromm, the public school teacher running for City Council in Jackson Heights, says he supports alternative certification programs such as Teach for America.

The information comes from surveys we sent to each contender in competitive races. The survey (read it here) asks candidates for their thoughts on the growth of charter schools, how tenure decisions should be made, and whether Schools Chancellor Joel Klein should be fired.

We’ll be adding to our repository of surveys as we receive more. Candidates, send your completed surveys to tips@gothamschools.org!

The same day the city announced a total hiring freeze, the Department of Education began lifting one of its own.

Last night, the department e-mailed new Teaching Fellows assigned to District 75, the city’s school district for the most disabled students, to let them know that they can now be hired for open positions in the district. For months, Teaching Fellows and all other teachers not already working in the system have been shut out of consideration for all positions at the department, the result of a cost-saving hiring freeze enacted in early May. 

The change means that about 10 percent of the city’s new Teaching Fellows are now eligible for positions, because about 70 of the 700 fellows currently in training have been assigned to District 75, according to a department spokeswoman, Ann Forte. (Another 330 of the 700 are being trained as special education teachers to work in general education schools, she said.) Previously, those teachers and others not already in the system could be hired only by new schools, and only in small numbers.

Another set of novice teachers so far shut out of most positions, those hired by Teach for America, will not be affected by the change, because TFA does not assign teachers to District 75, Forte said. Paraprofessionals, aides who work with needy students, are still barred from hiring and remain at risk of being laid off, even from District 75 schools, she said. (more…)

Teach for America is moving to the ‘burbs. The program will send 5 to 10 recruits to Westchester County this fall, where they’ll teach in a district that serves special education students from across the state.

In contrast to New York City, where Teach For America places hundreds of teachers every year, the Greenburgh-Graham Union Free School District has just two schools and about 350 students, all of whom come from low-income families and have severe special needs. All of the TFA teachers there will have special education certification, said a spokeswoman for the organization, Kerci Marcello Stroud.

One reason for the upstate expansion is that working in Greenburgh-Graham helps TFA fulfill its mission of helping at-risk students, Stroud said. There’s also the fact that the New York schools the organization usually works with, in New York City, are shutting new teachers out right now because of the city’s budget-induced hiring restrictions.

Teach For America’s New York City chapter admitted fewer applicants this year and is planning to have a far higher proportion of them teach at charter schools, which are not subject to the hiring restrictions. The handful of teachers going to Greenburgh-Graham were admitted to the New York Region and will go through the same hiring process as any other candidate, Marcello Stroud told me.

TFA is also placing teachers in Queens for the first time in more than a decade, according to an e-mail sent to corps members and alumni this morning. The national organization has placed teachers in New York City schools since its launch 20 years ago.

Teach for America is reassuring its 2009 corps members assigned to New York City public schools that they’ll likely have spots come September — despite a hiring freeze that prohibits most Department of Education principals from hiring new teachers.

The assurances came in an e-mail message to people who were hired to join schools via Teach For America in September. “Despite some of the uncertainty that exists currently across the city, the NYCDOE and our charter partners continue to provide us with enough evidence to suggest that placing 230 corps members in district schools, and the remaining 100 in charter schools, will be possible,” Jemina Bernard, the executive director of Teach For America’s New York City branch, wrote in the e-mail.

The hiring freeze, announced earlier this month, prohibits principals at district schools that have operated for more than three years from filling vacancies with new teachers. A tight budget situation has already inspired Teach For America to scale down the number of people it recruited to work in New York City, and Teach For America is now sending more of its corps members to city charter schools, which are exempt from the hiring freeze.

Bernard’s e-mail message explains exceptions to the freeze, and it tells prospective teachers that the majority of them cannot be hired “unless and until the restrictions are lifted.”

The Teach For America corps member who sent the message to me said many corps members were calmed by the note. “There’s no evidence to suggest that we can’t hold them to their word,” the corps member said. “If they were going to screw this up, they would know by now.” But the email’s sender was skeptical and thought Teach For America was being overly optimistic. (more…)

Teach for America, the program that places new teachers in hard-to-staff public schools, is planning to send nearly a third of its new New York City teachers to charter schools this fall, up from just 3% in 2005, internal TFA projections show.

The shift to charter schools insulates the latest batch of Teach For America teachers from a new-teacher hiring freeze the city announced earlier this month. Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated, so they aren’t subject to the freeze and can hire any certified teacher, whether she is already in the Department of Education system or not.

The move follows a downsizing in Teach For America’s pool to about 300 from 500 teachers last year. The city’s dismal budget picture led to the retraction. (more…)